Describing what happened when the Celestial Arrow discarded took Vorador perhaps the remainder of his life. Even centuries to come he would ponder just how to put into words the sights and sensations, not for anyone to actually understand for rather his own comprehension. It was an event which not even the most gifted story teller could accurately describe. Often he would attempt to write it down only to find his own imagination sourly lacking and not up to the task.
The chamber was suddenly filled with lancing, jagged bolts of pure energy. The unexpected tempest was like no storm any of them had ever seen, a whirling tunnel of lightning that expected out with the pyramid as its focused eye. However it was not fear if physical harm that drove them away. These were not bolts of arcane lightning like those cast by even the most inept sorcerer. These were leeching tendrils, reaching out and drawing away energy from anything within its radius. Vorador had felt their pull and it had been horrifying. They had been trying to grasp and pull at his very essence, the unique part of himself, trying to steal him out of his very body. There was no other way to describe it than they had been attempting to steal his soul.
Raziel had said that after his 'rebirth', he had become a devourer of souls; capable of tearing away the essence of his defeated foes and using that energy to augment himself. Even if he had believed most of his tale, Vorador had been sceptical of that particular claim. What he had felt as he fled from that cavernous chamber had been enough to utterly confirm the existence of such a horrible, terrifying phenomenon.
Somehow the three of them; battered and confused, wound  up back in the central plaza where the portal Bane had opened had first brought them. The shattered, broken bodies of Werewolves of both black  and white variety were scattered everywhere as a testament to Thanatos' enraged ravening. Perhaps some of their kind had survived, driven to hide deep in the depths of this city. However with the Alpha males of both their breeds dead, the future of both Werewolf tribes was uncertain.
Bane was the first too look back, half turning to see down the wide path between the red stone buildings. They could not see the dome anymore, hidden by the ring of pyramids that encircled it like a wall.
"By all the venerated ancestors..." The Druid breathed, his voice hoarse and croaky. Vorador turned at his words and looked back himself, skidding to an abrupt halt. Back from where they had fled, the skyline was begins to burn with a strange but beautiful white fire, flames of it were licking back and forth like an intense forest fire. The flames were beginning to slowly whirl as if brought together by an encircling wind, pulling down to focus on a single point.
Then with a sudden burst and an odd choir like groan, the flames surged into one and then rocketed upward in the form of an immense pillar of light. It shoot skyward, going on and on until it was impossible to see the far end of it. Vorador stood there, simply watching the pillar rise up and up until he was certain it had surpassed the very limits of the sky. It was truly a sight to behold, an unbroken pillar of light. Pulses of more intense light rose quickly from its base at  regular intervals to travel up its length and disappear into the sky.
Unlike his two unlikely companions at his side he could feel exactly what that light was composed of. It was a undiluted torrent of the purest essence of Spirit, all the elements in utter harmony and then discharged in one focused burst. The Celestial Arrow was aptly named indeed for it was poetry in motion, the ultimate expression of the Serioli creed and pathos.
Gradually, he became aware of a strange deep sound and his ears flicked up in response, trying to hear it. It grew stronger in direct proportion to the intensity of that column of light but did not seem to be coming from it, but rather from some immense distance. Neither Bane nor William reacted to that sound as it grew, their attention fixed on the display. Vorador began to suspect that it was a sound that only he could hear.
Soon he was able to make out inflections and realised, with some genuine surprise, he was hearing a near continuous cry of pain. It seemed to echo and resonate through both the air and the ground at the same time, a deep sound that sounded very much like it being made from underwater. Each time the pillar of light flared the cry and wail intensified, as if the light itself were the source of the pain being inflicted.
Grimly, he realised then exactly what he was hearing. The cry he was hearing, which despite now becoming as loud in his mind as every bell in every church across the land rung at once was still not calling the attention of his companions, was a spiritual sound rather than a real one. He was not sure why only he seemed able to hear that cry but he knew it now for what it was. It was the cries of one of those strange unearthly beings that Kothar's avatar had dubbed ' the travellers'. Moreover, he suspected intently that it was the cry of the Elder, the parasitic entity which had been instrumental in causing the extinction of the Dragon species. This was the being which Raziel claimed was their true ultimate enemy, the so called Oracle God of the Wheel of Fate, wailing as the weapon which eons ago had caused him so much pain was discharged again.
Slowly the beam of light before them began to ebb and flicker, losing its lustre. Then all at once it collapsed and disappeared like the snuffed out flame of a candle. As it vanished, so did the wail of distant pain fading away to little more than a far flung echo. There was a long moment of silence where there was not even the sound of the wind moving through the buildings of the ancient city.
The others perhaps were overcome by the events but Vorador had a different source of grim preoccupation. He could feel Thanatos' blood still pulsing within him. Usually when sampling blood its reinforcing effects lessen overtime. That was certainly not the case here. There was no dissipation and seemed only to be getting strong as the knowledge and power he had inadvertently absorbed seemed finally to settle. He certainly did not have control over it, at least not yet but he could feel it changing him inside, not so much in a physical sense but more in how he perceived things. Many held preconceptions were being shuffled around as if some invisible force were reorganising his very mind.
Had it been a mistake to bite the Dragon and drink his blood? For how it was hard to say but whatever the case may be he was certain that the consequences would be astronomical. Another thing was also obvious. It had not ended as he had imagined but he had certain come to the end of his long journey and quest.
"I...will have to inform the Circle about this." Bane began in a slow, rough voice. He paused then to drag a trembling and still blue hand over his face as if trying to control his chattering teeth by manual force. "Any and all mention of these events must be concealed for at all time." The Druid added and sounded a bit more like his erasable self. Vorador supposed that was the only thing the Circle could  and would do, censure what had taken place. If any group had the power to conceal what had happened here from mention in history it would be the Guardian Circle.
"And if you value your life, your majesty, you will say nothing of this either!" Bane snapped, turning to glare at William almost savagely. The young king started at being addressed and gave the Druid an unamused, supercilious look.
"Oh yes..." He said sarcastically. "I can just imagine going up to my royal ministers and telling them I'd just returned from an epic battle in which I fought alongside a Druid and a Vampire against a Dragon." He rolled his eyes exasperatedly. "Don't state the obvious." He said with censure.  "If I told them what really happened here I'd be ousted from the throne and sequestered in a lunatic asylum faster than I could take a breath!"
Bane growled and waved the tip of his safe at the young man.
"Don't take that impudent tone with me, boy!" He snapped, his grip on his staff unsteady making it pop erratically up and down. “I was frozen today!”
"And I lost the greatest sword I have ever laid eyes upon!" William retorted and the pain of that loose was in his eyes and tone, his face strained. Admitting that loose seemed to take something out of him and he deflated, his shoulders slumping. He paused for a moment, then cast Vorador a wheedling sideways glance.
"I do not suppose you would forge me another?" He asked tentatively. Vorador did not even look at him, his gaze fixed on the horizon. William sighed. "It didn't hurt to ask."
Vorador sensed her presence long before she spoke and was turning around even as the other two were still talking about what they would do. The Seer was just standing there, staring at him with her usual half sultry smile, halfway between him and the arcane portal which lead out of this secret ancient place. Her long slender body gleamed in the faint, alien light of the Lost City. She looked exactly the same from when he had left, as if she had come here directly after she had sent him on his way. That, Vorador realised, was entirely both possible and likely. She had dispatched him into the past and claimed that when he found the Celestial Arrow, she would appear to take him back to his own native time and now here she was as promised.
"Has my faith in your abilities been well placed?" She asked in her heavily accented voice, approaching him with a sway of her hips. At the sound of her voice, Bane and William nearly jumped in surprise and swung to face her, eyes wide at the appearance of a member of a species none of them had ever seen before. She all but ignored their presence, striding directly up to Vorador and looking him in the eye.
Vorador met her gaze with a strangely neutral feeling inside him. Often during this long journey he had been becoming so irritated with her for sending him on the quest that he had contemplating going far as to cause her physical pain. Now however he just looked at her steadily with calm detachment, as if he were divorced from his own emotions.
"Do you have it?" She asked him without bothering to explain to what she was referring to. She did not need to explain and they both knew it. Deliberately slowly, the Vampire reached into his over jacket. When he brought his hand out in his grasp was the fist sized, glossy dark decahedron they had discovered in the depths of the city which had projected the illusion of Kothar's avatar. Beneath its glass like surface glistened the many slushy lights moving on their course. After the record of the long dead Dragon had told him where to find the Arrow, he had removed the object and taken it with him.
The Seer looked into its depths, a mixture of darkness and light with a strange expression; an intense mix of wonder, satisfaction, desire and  elation.
"Thank you Vorador." She said as her hands curled around the relic and gently lifted it from his grasp, holding it up to her face so she could examine it in far greater detail, her face reflected in its surface amongst the flickering lights. Vorador folded his arms slowly over his chest, regarding her glee at beholding the relic with a tired realisation.
"It was never really about the Arrow." He said with flat confidence with neither censure or approval in his tone. "It was this that you really wanted, wasn't it?" The Seer's smile widened in response and her glance at him was impish, almost coy. With her hands grasping Kothar's record tightly to her, the Hylden woman chuckled and stepped to one side.
"The Arrow was certainly very important, but not for us." She clarified, still smile. "We're not quite there yet." Her hands caressed the seamless surface of the record like it was the most precious jewel in all the world, looking down at it with hungry eyes.
"This however is what will cause the most ripples. This  is our heritage, a legacy left to us all. Undeniable proof of the common source and origin of us all." Suddenly it was all perfectly clear, the entire reason behind this little journey into the past and the quest she had set him. While perhaps she might have plans for the Arrow itself at a later date, what she had really wanted was the record. It was a political tool for her, ammunition to use so that she could consolidate her hold on the Hylden settlers in Avernus and control the three Houses.
"Thus speaks the queen of the Hylden." He declared, almost mockingly. "The true, noble visionary of her people."
"Oh so THATS a Hylden!" William proclaimed. The Seer frowned and turned to look at him, as if she had just noticed the presence of the other two standing there watching them. Imperiously she made a gesture with her free hand back towards the portal.
"Begone." She told them flatly and with curt dismissal. "Return to our roles in history and think no more of what you have seen." William, who perhaps had never been addressed so in his life, blinked at her words and stared for a long moment. Then he gave her a short respectful bow.
"Lady, I will not say a word to anyone of what I have experienced here today." He told her with a sly smile. "But I am free to think whatever I please."
Bane said nothing. He  looked first at Vorador, then at William and finally the new arrival. Whatever he thought of this Vorador would never know. With a grunt the Druid turned his back on them and stomped away. Without pausing he walked straight up to the portal and vanished into it, gone without so much as a word. The man would go and face his destiny now, driven mad by the corruption of the Pillar and conspiring to transform Nosgoth into a twisted parody within Dark Eden. He would meet his ends at the hands of Kain, eighty years from now. His death would leave the Pillar of Nature without a Guardian for eons to come.
William watched the Druid leave silently, then turned to look back at Vorador. His earnest young face was thoughtful and there seemed to be there a bit more wisdom than Vorador had observed during their first meeting in the mountain pass. He was still a glory seeking vain youth but now at least that was tempered by experience.
"I sense this is goodbye, Vorador." He began in a deliberately formal tone, straightening he pulled his hood back up over his head. "Perhaps we shall meet again someday."
Vorador regarded this grinning young man. Despite himself he could not help but find that William had appealing qualities. He may be manipulative and dangerous naive, but he was also determined, passionate, learned, earnest. When the Vampire thought that this man would be brought low by a Vampire sometime in the future and his murder used to justify Moebius' crusade, the notion made him intently melancholy.
"I doubt it." He said to the young king but his tone was as kind as he was ever going to make it when speaking to him. William maintained his wry smile as he turned away and followed the Druid up to the porthole. He hesitated at its edge, taking one last look back at the ancient Lord City and then stepped through and vanished.
The Seer sighed contentedly and took several steps back and forth almost giddily, sliding the relic she held from one hand to the other.
"And so the timeline continues as it always will, a steadfast immovable river." She said in some satisfaction. "You did well Vorador." She gave him a sultry sort of look that coming from any other woman might have been an intimate invitation. "Now then, I suppose you'll want to talk about your reward?"
Vorador supposed he ought to want to talk about that. It had been the driving force for his coming to the past in the first place, her promise to restore Umah to life. She had restored Janos back to health and sanity as a gesture of good will after all. He had done what she asked of him and now was the time to claim the prize had had been guaranteed. However, despite his best efforts, he found that his mind simply would not focus on Umah at all.
Instead it was focused on the Seer herself, regarding her body language, her happy expression of triumph, her almost childlike swaying that she indulged in, in her joy.  Precisely why he was suddenly so focused on her was a mystery for the moment. All he could say was that something seemed wrong with how she was acting. It seemed somehow wrong for the situation but he was not at all certain why that was. It kept nagging at him, unable to let him think of anything else.
Suddenly it came to him and everything seemed to mesh in his mind. It was the final little piece of the jigsaw puzzle and now he beheld everything. The picture it revealed however came as utterly no surprise.
"You must have been very young." He said in a resonate voice, full of pity. The Seer turned to look at him, raising one of her eyebrows questioningly for his confusing statement. "I do not know much about your childhood, but I can't imagine were very old when he appeared in the skies." He straightened and looked at her head on. "Bellowing fire and tearing the ground up the ground upon which you stood." He sighed. "A small child before the wrath of a Dragon. You were lucky to survive. No wonder you fear him so."
The effect of his words on the Seer was immediate and confirmed his suspicions. The colour drained from her face as her eyes began to widen. Her expression turned slowly from triumphant glee to a distorted mixture of dread and panic.
"How do you..." She began in a low voice.
"You have tried to manipulate others; Kain, Raziel and myself toward some end." He said, cutting her off. He walked right up to her so that she had to look up at him. From his angle she was no longer the confident, strong willed self proclaimed Queen of the Hylden people. She had been reduced back to the level of a scared child, her entire body trembling in fear.
"Whether that end can be considered beneficent I do not know, or even judge at this point." He said, fixing her eyes with his. "But you are no timestreamer." His tone turned flat and unfriendly. "You are capable of making blunders." There could be no softening of this blow and he didn't make the slightest attempt to do so. "And in setting me on this journey, the mistake you have just made could very well destroy you in every possible way."
The Hylden woman stood there stock still, a terrible fear of what those words might mean crossing plain across her face. This was the first time since he had rescued her from the depths of the Eternal Prison that he had seen her really frightened, scared and lost. She raised a hand out toward him in a desperate appeal and it shook noticeably.
"What are you saying?"She asked and her voice barely came out above a hoarse whisper. As such when the terrible bellowing crash erupted from directly behind them it almost seemed like she had not spoken at all. It was the sound of shattering, bursting stone being blasted out. As one they both turned to watch as large fragments of the cities red stone sailed past them through the air to crash into other buildings and break apart.  Vorador had to side step quickly to avoid some red bricks as they tumbled down and shattered on the ground.
High above them, silhouetted by the strange sky that encapsulated the Lost City, a large dark shape burst up into the air, trailing a cloud of  red dust. Even before the massive pair of leathery wings snapped wide, Vorador knew it to be Thanatos. The Dragon was covered in black marks, tears in his hide where he had been hurt during his fall. Even one of his forelimbs was twisted off at an ugly unnatural angle but despite the injuries he was still very much alive. Rearing his head back the beast roared out a bellow of utter indignation and rage, a roar that shook the buildings around them down to their foundation stones.
The Seer's gaze was fixed on him and contorted into an expression of horror, the kind of horror that Vorador had seen only once before when she had been strapped into that chamber in the Eternal Prison, unable to move and subject to her worst nightmares replayed over and over. But those had mere illusions. Before here now was the real thing and all the progress she had made over the centuries to recover from her imprisonment seemed to complete evaporate.
"N..no!" Her voice was a croak of despair as she collapsed down to her knees, Kothar's relic rolling away unnoticed and forgotten from her unresisting hands as she stared fixedly up at the colossal beast in the sky above them. "No, it can't be!"
Vorador stood in front of her, almost protectively, looking up at the Dragon as well, not taking his eyes off of the beast either. Somehow he sensed them, the beast's head snapping down to that the gaze of those eyes was fixed firmly on them. Vorador could feel Thanatos' rage and hatred lashing out even from this distance, boiling inside a mind which knew little else.
The Dragon spread his wings and lunged forward, plunging into a dive directly towards them. His jaws began to gape wide, tongues of elemental flame already trying to escape from between his teeth. Even as he did however, he was suddenly seized by a powerful band of red light. It materialised out of nowhere and restrained Thanatos so firmly he might as well have crashed into something solid.
Kept poised in mid air, struggling to free himself, the Dragon let out a protesting roar at his unexpected restraint. He tore violently back and forth, fire churning out from his jaws and elemental wind swirling around him. Several more bands of red light appeared, encircling him at several points. One wrapped around his midsection and tied his legs firmly to his tail. Another pushed his wings down to his body and bound them tight. A third band snapped quickly around his maw, keeping his mouth closed shut. Thrust up and unable to move, Thanatos was kept held firm.
It was then that Vorador noticed the far smaller figure directly before the Dragon. From this distance it was hard to make out very many specifics but he clearly saw a blue skinned and black winged figure, one of the Ancient Vampires. He was wrapped up in a dark red mantle with a long flowing drape down his back over one shoulder. He was completely bald and he held his hands out before him and as he gestured with each talon, the bands restricting the Dragon tightened.
The figure turned in mid air, his wings beating to keep him aloft, turning to look down at them. The strange white marking over the left-hand side of his face gave Vorador his identity immediately. He had seen his visage before, often in the stained glass windows of his ancestors and in many a human church. He was Ambriel-Divus, a venerated saint and patron of sorcerers.  He clearly saw them but turned back to the Dragon without paying them any heed.
Forcibly Ambriel brought his hands together, talons clenching around each other. The red bands of arcane energy with which he restrained Thanatos then flowed together on that command, forming a cocoon of red light over the beast's entire body. The enveloping light became so bright that Vorador had to shield his eyes. The flare lasted only a moment but when he looked his hand to look back up, the skies were empty. Both Thanatos and his surprising and unexpected assailant were gone.
It took a moment for the fact of that to sink in, it had happened so fast. The Vampire just stood there, listening to the silence of a city which would be abandoned once more once he left, perhaps for all time. Behind him, the Seer remained on her knees, trembling and reduced to strained breaths which in her panic and terror she could barely take. It gave him no pleasure to see her reduced to this state.
Slowly he reached down and picked Kothar's artefact back up in one hand,  turning his head to look down into the lights swirling beneath the dark surface.
"And now the might of the Dragon belongs to the Divus." He said, almost to himself. Know he truly perceived the war they were in, a war against the self proclaimed saints and demi-gods of the Wheel of Fate, an Olympian ruling class which thought it their destiny to lord over the universe  from now until the end of days. He did not know for what purpose they had come to abduct the Dragon. Perhaps they thought they could yoke his strength, galvanise it for their cause.
He looked down at the Seer, reduced to near gibbering terror by the mere thought. With a frown he reached down and took her by the arm, pulling her forcibly back to their feet. Her pale face was strained and lined with fear and terror.
"You have too much to do to afford this." He told her firmly, staring into her stricken face. "If you're goal is to truly as benevolent as you claim, then work through this fear."
"I can't!"She gasped, her voice so hoarse is was a croak. "I can't fight them now! I can't fight him! I can't fight them while they have him!"
"I beg to differ, Damkina." Vorador told her. "You started all this. You pushed us all down this path whether we wanted to proceed or not. You will fight them, even if I have to stand behind you with a club to make sure you do it." His face spilt into an uncharacteristic sardonic grin, the kind of grin William would have been proud of. "Besides, what good is having the strength of a Dragon going to do for them..." He brought the relic up before her face, their reflections distorted in its glossy surface and highlighted by its rippling flecks of light. "... when we have their brains?"